


seems there’s holes in all my fairy tales

by the_crownless_queen



Series: Sapphic September 2019 [12]
Category: Disney - All Media Types, Sleeping Beauty (1959), Tangled (2010)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Kinda, Pre-Relationship, Sapphic September, Sapphic September 2019, Time Travel, mostly ignores the evil witches parts of the plot of both movies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:16:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24595894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_crownless_queen/pseuds/the_crownless_queen
Summary: “Look, Pascal,” she says, reaching out to place him in her hand and hold him up to the sky. “Shooting stars.”-- Or, Rapunzel makes a wish. It isn't to see the lanterns, but it still comes true, in a roundabout way.
Relationships: Aurora/Rapunzel (Disney), Pascal & Rapunzel (Disney)
Series: Sapphic September 2019 [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1473389
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	seems there’s holes in all my fairy tales

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I just love this pairing a lot for some reason, and the idea that Rapunzel would wake Aurora is like, my favorite thing.  
> I haven't watched the Sleeping Beauty movie in ages though, so I might have taken some liberties and it's probably kind of closer to a weird mix-match of different versions of the tale... Hopefully not too much :p  
> Written for Day 24 of Sapphic September 2019: Time Travel.  
> Hope you guys enjoy this, it was fun to write :)

The thing is, really, that Rapunzel’s tower is  _ lonely. _ Her mother’s almost never there — not that Rapunzel blames her for that, of course, she knows how busy her mother is and how hard she tries to be there for her daughter, how  _ difficult _ it is to keep her safe… But it’s still  _ lonely. _

There’s really only so many stories she can tell herself about the outside world, so many books she can read (and re-read, and re-re-read, and…) and even she gets sick of cookies after a while.

She wishes, sometimes, that she’d had a sibling. She’d tried asking her mother for one once, back when she’d been too young to really know how children worked, and boy, had that been an embarrassing conversation to have.

“You know, Pascal, sometimes I really wish you could talk back,” Rapunzel says, sighing as she collapses on her windowsill. It’s night outside — there is no moon tonight, but there are so many stars it doesn’t feel really dark — so Pascal’s little chameleon eyes shine back at her balefully.

She laughs. “You’d probably tell me to shut up, wouldn’t you?” she asks, pouting. She looks up and gasps, laughing as her leaning forward almost sends her toppling off her tower.

“Whoops,” she says, grinning widely at her friend as she catches herself with her hair, “guess it’s lucky you were the only one there, isn’t it?”

Pascal, of course, doesn’t reply.

Rapunzel’s distracted by another streak of light from above, and then another, and another. It’s not the first time she’s seen them — they come around every year, even though they’re a little early this once — but there are so many now, so many stars shooting across the sky, and she can’t help but gasp again.

“Look, Pascal,” she says, reaching out to place him in her hand and hold him up to the sky. “Shooting stars.”

She grins down at him secretively. “You know what this means, right?” She imagines Pascal nods back at her. “Yes, that’s right! It means we get to make a  _ wish!  _ Oh, but what could it be…”

She frets over it. Of course she does, it’s the most eventful thing that’s happened since the last time Mother came to visit —  _ ages _ and  _ ages _ ago now — and it means she can make a wish, like when it’s her birthday and Mother asks her what she wants as a gift.

Another shooting star streaks across the sky, and Rapunzel’s heart jumps. She clenches her hands around her hair tightly, until her knuckles bleed white and her fingers feel the strain of it.

“I wish…” She trails off, unsure suddenly.

Usually, she’d wish to go see the lanterns. It’s all she ever wanted — to go there on her birthday, because there  _ has _ to be a connection — but it’s been so long, and the world outside is dangerous…

Maybe Mother’s right, and Rapunzel should find better, more realistic dreams.

“I wish,” she repeats, and then blushes, slapping her forehead. “Silly me,” she splutters, laughing, “you’re not supposed to say it out loud!”

_ I wish, _ she thinks, staring up at another white streak of light shooting across the sky.

_ I wish I didn’t have to feel so lonely… _

The rest fizzles in her mind like smoke.

* * *

When Rapunzel wakes up, her first thought is that something went wrong, because this can’t be her room. There are no traces of her drawings anywhere, and she can smell neither the faint odor of paint that always, always lingers no matter how hard she tries to get rid of it, nor the warm remnants of the cookies she guiltily baked yesterday morning.

The room smells old and dusty, and she sneezes.

Pascal sneezes back, and Rapunzel blinks back at him.

“Where are we?” she asks him, rising to her feet slowly and dusting off her knees with a grimace.

It really isn’t fair. She’d cleaned everything up yesterday, how can there be so much dust again?

“Ugh,” she says as she takes in the room. It’s so much worse than she’d thought — there are  _ spiderwebs everywhere, _ and dust particles in the air. When she runs her hand across the dresser behind her, it leaves a mark.

She’s feeling a little more awake now — still tired though, and she has to stifle a yawn — so she tries to take in more of this weird room she’s in.

Maybe Mother took her someplace else, though Rapunzel can’t imagine why or how she’d have slept through it.

She runs a hand through her hair, winces as it pulls at a painful knot and mourns the apparent loss of her hairbrush, looks up and  _ freezes. _

“What…”

This is her room. Her tower. There is no way it can be anything else — Rapunzel’s spent too long staring at those wooden beams to mistake them for something else.

But her paintings are nowhere to be seen, and the walls look younger somehow, even with the dust.

Her heart lurches in her chest, and she pulls Pascal closer. “I think,” she tells him in a very soft voice, “that my wish went wrong.”

* * *

Her tower is quiet and cold. Rapunzel’s calling it her tower still, even though it can’t possibly be — she’d never let it get this dirty, for once, or let it look so dull (where are all the colors??) — because she doesn’t want to think about it.

She thinks about it.

Her tower’s never been cold before, not even in the winter, when it snowed and hailed outside. She’d always managed to keep a fire going, and it warmed the place quickly and efficiently, making it cozy and liveable.

This place is neither. It feels… It feels dead.

Rapunzel sneezes again.

There is, of course, one big difference between this tower and  _ her  _ tower. One big, glaring, obvious difference.

She’s talking about the stairs, of course. They go down, further than Rapunzel’s ever been able to go.

Faintly, she wonders if they might even lead her  _ outside. _

She’s been hovering in front of them for a very long time now, too, and her stomach has started to protest her inaction very loudly. 

She looks down at Pascal. “What do you think?” she asks. 

Pascal stares back at her placidly. 

“Right, of course.” She takes a deep breath, forces her hands to steady. “I should go, I know.” She closes her eyes, peaks at the stairs, and closes them again. Slowly,  _ very _ slowly, she puts her toes on the first step down.

She yelps and jumps backward, heart pounding in her chest. Pascal, still perched on her shoulder, lets out what could be described as a scream, and jumps into her hair.

“I’m fine, I’m fine!” she yells, and then, because of course she does, she slips on her hair and falls down on her ass.

“Ouch.”

She unhooks Pascal from her hair carefully — the poor thing’s turned blond out of fright — and looks at the stairs again, and then at her toes. She wiggles them; they’re fine.

Of course they are.

Her cheeks burn. “Well, Pascal,” she says, coughing a little, “I think  _ maybe _ I might have overreacted a little.”

Pascal stares back silently. Rapunzel’s cheeks burn hotter. 

She gets up again. “Okay, okay,” she tells herself, putting Pascal back on her shoulder and slowly walking back toward the stairs. “I can do this. I can doooo this. I can —”

She jumps down on the first step, eyes clenched shut, and bites back a scream.

A beat passes, and then another, and Rapunzel slowly blinks her eyes open. She pats herself down, laughing. “I’m fine! I’m fine!”

She doesn’t know who she’s saying it for — herself, probably — but it makes her laugh harder.

All this over a single step, and nothing happened.  _ Nothing happened. _ She’s fine, she feels normal — great, even.

She runs down the rest of the stairs, laughing.

* * *

The stairs lead her into a large, open corridor. It’s empty but for ornate tapestries hanging from the wall and unlit torches, and Rapunzel can’t help but gape at them, because as far as she knows,  _ there has never been a corridor there. _

It’s still not like she’s  _ outside, _ though, she reasons, and steps forward carefully down the corridor.

“Do you think we’ll meet anyone?” she asks Pascal in a whisper, unsure whether she’s hoping for a positive or negative answer.

Pascal, of course, doesn’t answer at all.

The corridor is empty and quiet. So is the room after that, and the one after that, and the one after  _ that. _

“Pascal,” she says after closing the fourth door to an empty room, “I think that I might be dreaming.”

But when she pinches herself, she doesn’t wake up.

“Well,” she argues at Pascal’s unimpressed look, “maybe it’s a very vivid type of dreaming?”

Rapunzel sighs. “I wish we would meet someone, though,” she says. “Maybe they could explain how my tower is apparently attached to all these rooms now.” She pouts down at her friend. “You’d really think I’d have noticed them before, wouldn’t you?”

The next room, as it turns out, holds people.

Unfortunately, none of them are moving, and Rapunzel screams and jumps back, slamming the door shut behind her, gathering her hair to herself (it’s so dirty now, she sobs inwardly, getting all this dust and cobwebs out is going to take  _ ages) _ and clenching it to her chest.

She steps away from the door carefully, one step at a time. No noise comes from inside, even though she screamed loud enough to wake the dead.

Her heart skips a beat. She turns to Pascal. “Do you think… No, they  _ can’t _ be… But what if they are?”

Pascal stares back unblinkingly.

Rapunzel steps forward again. “Okay. Okay,” she whispers to Pascal. “I’m just going to take a quick look again, and I’ll be very quiet about it, and you’ll be quiet too, okay?”

She takes Pascal’s silence as an agreement, and cracks the door open slowly.

It opens soundlessly, and Rapunzel peaks her head inside, heart racing and fist pressed to her mouth to stop herself from screaming again.

The people inside haven’t moved.

_ Come on, come on,  _ she tells herself, and with another deep breath, she steps inside.

She almost instantly collapses, her back against the door.

_ Breathe in, breathe out, _ she tells herself.  _ You can do it, it’s not that hard. _

The people are spread across the room. There aren’t many of them — maybe four or five, really — but it’s still more people than she’s ever seen before, and all of them are lying on the ground like they just suddenly keeled over.

“They don’t look dead, though, right, Pascal?”

Because that’s the thing, really — they don’t  _ look _ dead. They did at first, but it makes no sense from closer up. They look like they’re sleeping instead, the way Mother does on the few occasions they’d spent the night curled up in bed together when Rapunzel had been younger.

They’re also covered in dust.

She crawls over to the closest one — a plump-looking man, dressed in red velvety garments unlike anything Rapunzel’s ever seen — and pokes him in the forearm. He doesn’t react.

He does, however, breathe. There is a strand of mousy brown hair hanging in front of his face, and every time he exhales, it flies up into the air, only fall back down a second later, and then up again.

It’s kind of fun to watch, even if the situation is also weirdly terrifying.

Exciting too, because this is starting to feel like a proper  _ adventure, _ like the ones in the books Mother doesn’t like her to read.

Rapunzel’s brought back to reality by another loud rumble coming from her stomach, and she flushes red.

“Right,” she says. “Food. That’s a thing. A thing that I need.”

There is, of course, nothing to eat here, and since she doesn’t want to keep staring at the creepy sleeping people, she sneaks back out of the room as silently as she can.

“Well,” she whispers to Pascal as she closes the door, “that happened.”

Pascal nods, a silent,  _ yes, it did, _ and Rapunzel swallows back a nervous giggle.

They find miraculously unspoiled food in a dining room in a branching corridor, and Rapunzel rinses off all the fruit she can carry. Sadly, unspoiled doesn’t mean ‘not covered in dust’.

She feeds bits of an apple she found to Pascal as they walk through what is pretty clearly now a castle while she eats the grapes she rarely ever gets to taste, and eventually, they reach another staircase, spiraling up into a familiar-looking tower.

At first, she thinks it’s the one she came from and she hurries over, thinking maybe things will return to normal if she gets back up, but as she nears the stairs themselves, she realizes the lighting is different.

And as she climbs, she notices more differences too: the stone is lighter here; warmer to the touch, too. The steps are smooth, worn down where the ones she’d ran down before had been rougher.

It isn’t  _ her _ tower, but that doesn’t stop her. It hasn’t yet, after all, and now that she’s no longer so hungry she is so curious her fingers tingle with it.

The stairs end in front of a heavy wooden door and Rapunzel pauses in front of it, her heart racing for some inexplicable reason. 

“Well,” she starts, turning to Pascal and wiping her sweaty palms on her dress, “what do you think? Should we go in?”

Pascal’s tongue pokes out of his mouth and he curls up on her shoulder. Rapunzel laughs. “Tired, huh?” she asks, trailing an absent finger on his back. “That’s fine, you can sleep.”

Pascal curls up tighter and Rapunzel rolls her eyes fondly. He’s really no help at all.

Taking a deep breath, Rapunzel knocks against the door. She’s not expecting an answer, and when she indeed doesn’t get one, she pushes it open slowly.

It opens noiselessly, the wood lighter than it should be, and Rapunzel steps into a wide, open room.

She almost steps right back out when she sees the girl lying on the large bed in the middle of the room, her blonde hair spread like a crown around her. Her heart gives a sharp pang.

“Oh,” she says out loud, slowly inching closer.

Rapunzel stops next to the bed, and pokes the girl in the shoulder. She, just like the man from before, doesn’t react. Her chest rises and falls slowly, like she’s in a deep sleep, but she doesn’t stir when Rapunzel tries to wake her up again.

And Rapunzel tries many, many things. She makes noise — bangs the metallic bell-like thing that hid the girl’s food, even though the ringing makes her head hurt, and chatters loudly about how weird this whole situation is.

She blows air in the girl’s ear and gets Pascal awake to poke his tongue through her left ear — something that’s never failed to jerk Rapunzel awake in the middle of the night when her friend was feeling mischievous. She even unearths a dusty-looking feather to run under the sleeping girl’s nose.

Nothing works, and Rapunzel collapses against the bed, defeated.

“I don’t understand, Pascal,” she says. “It’s like…” She perks up, eye going wide. “It’s like a curse!” she exclaims, whirling around to look at Pascal, perched on the bed. “Like Mother mentioned!”

Rapunzel doesn’t know much about magic, of course, but she does know one way to deal with curses. It’s the whole reason Mother has to keep her safe, after all.

Heart racing, Rapunzel turns to Pascal again. She twists her hands in her hair, and swallows. “Do you think…?”

Pascal blinks back.

“It could work,” Rapunzel says, gnawing at her lips. “I know it would, Mother said my hair could heal  _ anything,  _ and this is definitely a healing situation. But…” She clenches her hair to her chest. “Mother’s always said it’d be dangerous to let anyone else know.”

She looks back at the sleeping girl. She can’t be much older than Rapunzel herself, but who knows how long she’s been sleeping like this if this is a curse.

Who knows if she’ll always be  _ sleeping, _ if this curse isn’t going to get worse and kill everyone one day?

“I have to help them, Pascal,” Rapunzel says, nodding decisively to herself. “It isn’t right otherwise. I’ll just…” She swallows. “Lie if they ask how I did it.” She nods again. “Yes, that’s what I’ll do.”

She jumps to her feet, sways as her feet tangle in her hair and catches herself on the bed, laughing to herself as she tosses her hair back.

“Okay,” she mutters, gathering up her hair and dumping it on the bed and over the sleeping girl. “Okay, I can do this.”

She eyes the girl bitterly as she sits on the edge of the bed. “You know, at least Mother brushes my hair when I do this,” she says with a pout, before taking a deep breath and starting to  _ sing. _

Rapunzel knows the song by heart now, of course. Sometimes she thinks she can even hear it in her dreams. It’s easy to sing it now, and she grins as her hair lights up.

She keeps singing for a few moments before letting the song end, and she stares gingerly at the sleeping girl’s face, her heart in her throat.

A beat passes, and then a second — and just as Rapunzel is starting to think that maybe it didn’t work, the girl’s eyes blink open.

She has very pretty eyes, Rapunzel thinks absently even as she tumbles off the bed in surprise, her hair following after her.

* * *

As it turns out, the sleeping girl has a name. That name is Aurora, and she’s a princess.

“Wow,” Rapunzel says, still on the floor. “I’ve never met a princess before.”

Aurora laughs, yawning as she slowly sits up on the bed. “It’s fine. I’m not much of a princess, really.”

Rapunzel frowns. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

Aurora shrugs. She opens her mouth to speak, but Rapunzel will never know what she’d been going to say, because three colorful streaks of light suddenly burst into the room.

Aurora lights up. “Aunties!” she exclaims, and before Rapunzel’s baffled eyes, the three little balls of light turn into three women, who grin down at Aurora.

“Oh, it worked!” the plump, short one wearing blue cheers. “See, Fauna, Flora, I told you it would work!”

“Yes, yes, Merryweather, you did,” the tall one wearing red — Flora? — replies. She tries to sound exasperated, Rapunzel can tell, but she’s grinning too widely for that to truly work. “Good work, I guess,” she adds, feigning a put-upon sigh. “We’ll never hear the end of it now, Fauna,” she adds in a mutter to her friend in green.

“What happened?” Aurora asks, frowning up at her aunts.

Instantly, the three women sober up.

“I… Dear,” Flora starts, “you were cursed.

“Whole castle was,” Fauna interrupts. “It’s okay now, though”, she hastens to add at Aurora’s panicked look. “You fixed it!”

“But… how? Aunties, I don’t understand.”

Merryweather steps up with a kind smile. “You were cursed to prick your finger on a spinning wheel's spindle and die, but I twisted it, see, and made it so you’d sleep instead, and true love’s kiss would wake you up!” She swoons a little. “Oh, so romantic!

“So, who was it?” Merryweather asks, though it’s obvious that Fauna and Flora aren’t far behind.

Flummoxed, Aurora turns her eyes to Rapunzel, who squeaks and tries to hide her face in her hair.

When it doesn’t work, though, she just smiles and waves. “Erm, hi?”

The three fairies stare back at her.

Rapunzel clears her throat and tries to hope her cheeks aren’t  _ too _ red. Judging from how hot they feel, that’s kind of hopeless really, but you never know with those things.

“I’m Rapunzel,” she says. “But erm, there was no kissing involved?” She frowns. “Wouldn’t that be weird, anyway, kissing someone who’s asleep?”

Aurora snorts out a laugh. “She has a point, aunties.”

It’s only when the three fairies keep staring at Rapunzel that she remembers she was supposed to  _ lie _ about how she woke up Aurora, and that this ‘true love’s kiss’ thing would have made the perfect excuse.

“You broke the curse, though,” Flora replies while Rapunzel starts spiraling.

Blinking, Rapunzel stares back. “Huh, yes? I mean, Aurora’s awake now.”

Flora hums pensively, tapping her wand against her lips for a few seconds before she turns to Merryweather. “How sure are you,” she asks, “that it needed to be true love’s  _ kiss?” _

Merryweather blinks. “I…” She deflates, her eyes widening. “I don’t know, actually. Could have just been any act of true love, I guess.” She pouts and mutters to herself, “I still think a kiss would have been more romantic, though.”

Flora turns back to Rapunzel, grinning. “Well, there you have it, dear — it didn’t need to be a  _ kiss, _ it just needed to be true love.”

…  _ Could it be? _ Rapunzel swallows, tilting her head up to stare at Aurora. The other girl’s pretty, yes, and Rapunzel had felt sorry for her, when she’d seen her sleeping. She had wanted to help, she remembers, with an acute kind of desperation that had made her heart ache, just a little.

Could she call it love, though?

She looks back at Aurora, who looks almost as lost and embarrassed as she feels, and her lips quirk up into a smile almost on their own.

_ Oh, _ she thinks.

It isn’t love. Not really, at least — no, Rapunzel’s still pretty sure her hair did their magic and bypassed the whole ‘true love’ part of the curse.

So it isn’t love. But Aurora is pretty, and she looks kind — was kind, even, in those short moments they’d talked before — so maybe it could be love.

You know, one day.


End file.
